Welcome to TV Week, my five-part series on the broad television kaleidoscope — with tips, explainers and insights into this vast landscape, including the hidden strategy of meetings and development, and an answer to the debate over movies vs. TV. Today’s installment: the future of the entire medium.
For an industry as big and all-consuming as television — a pie from which every studio has turned itself inside out to get a bigger slice — it’s incredible how much of its future is up in the air right now.
What will this business look like in five years?
Who will be watching in seven years?
Will it exist in 10 years?
The range of possible outcomes is nearly infinite.
The big questions, however, mostly fit in three giant buckets.
- How many networks will be making how many shows?
- Will scripted shows exist — and will people be watching?
- How will AI unsettle TV production as we know it?
Follow any of those paths, and you can end up in Anchorage, Alaska, or Buenos Aires – or at the bottom of the sea.
The outcomes are myriad and from where we sit, unknowable.
So what better time than now to break them down one by one.
I. What Is the Future of Networks?
With no intervening events, we are on track for a world of enormous consolidation — perhaps even just three major streamers (Netflix, Disney, Paramount/HBO Max) with the smaller players occupying the corners of the business because they can (think: Apple, Amazon and Comcast, which owns NBC/Peacock).
What could change that?
The simplest thing would be for one of those smaller players to decide it wants to be a larger player. Two of them definitely have the cash on hand to make that choice anytime they want without breaking a sweat — and the fact that they are in the second-tier category is a matter of what, to date, has seemed to be their inclination.
On the other hand, one thing that could change that path is a major streamer hitting a bad run of luck. Believe it or not, this remains a hit-driven industry, and the ability to regularly produce hugely popular shows has been crucial to the growth and stability of the major streamers, which spend wildly in search of a home run.
But at some point — particularly as subscriber growth crests and maybe even goes into retreat — more traditional economics might assert themselves, and the investors might start saying: You don’t get unlimited at-bats every inning until you hit a home run, but get three outs and you’re done once again.
If that happens, the old laws of hits and flops would also start to reassert themselves. And among those laws is the fact that, in both film and television, every studio and network that has ever existed sooner or later hits a real losing streak. Everyone’s day comes around. The streamers’ leadership would like to believe their subscriber base insulates them from that, and to a degree it does.
But we haven’t seen in this era what could happen to a streamer that can’t produce a new hit for an extended period. And when we do…
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